Vagina Monologues

(Scene: The Bizarro Universe, January 1942. Bizarro Adm. William Leahy, chief
of staff to Bizarro President Franklin Roosevelt and de facto first chairman
of the Bizarro Joint Chiefs of Staff, enters the oval office of the Bizarro
White House.)

Bizarro Leahy: Mr. President, your national security team has just adjourned
after agreeing on what we think is the perfect Pacific strategy.

Bizarro FDR: (Pauses.) But, uh, William, what about the Philippines
and New Zealand and Singapore and Midway and the Solomon Island chain and so
forth?

Bizarro Leahy: Sir, Alaska is definitely the center of gravity of the war in
the Pacific.

Bizarro FDR: But it’s not exactly in the center, is it? It’s more toward the
top, wouldn’t you agree?

Bizarro Leahy: Yes, Mr. President, but it’s like they say, a fish rots from
the head down.

Bizarro FDR: (Stroking his chin.) They do say that, don’t they?

Bizarro Leahy: You see, Mr. President, Midway and the Solomons and Singapore
and so forth are important strategic targets, but the Japanese can’t capture
them unless they have a sanctuary in Alaska from which to plan their operations.

Bizarro FDR: By George, William, you’ve explained it all perfectly. Thank goodness
I have the expertise and experience of you and your Bizarro Chiefs of Staff
to explain things to me. Order another 30,000 of our troops to Alaska then,
and I’ll speak with Bizarro Winston Churchill about sending an additional 10,000
Australians and New Zealanders and Canadians to help out.

Barack Obama’s Af-Pak strategy must have the real FDR clawing at his coffin
lid. The new strategy was cooked up by the same group of stooges Robert Dreyfuss
laughably described as "Obama’s
Chess Masters" in the April 2009 edition of Rolling Stone, one
of the country’s most authoritative voices on military and foreign policy matters.

In March, the pawn pushers announced a strategy
that promised to disrupt, dismantle, and defeat al-Qaeda, give Afghanistan a
real government and security force, establish civilian control of Pakistan,
and involve the "international community" in achieving all of these
"realistic and achievable" objectives.

Within months of assuming command of Af-Pak, Gen. Stanley McChrystal, whose
previous combat job had been to command the Joint Special Operations Command,
then-vice president Dick
Cheney’s personal assassination team, decided he needed a new strategy.

So Obama sent his chess masters back to work on the project and they met and
met for weeks and weeks in a "deliberative process," and here’s what
they came up with.

The main objective, as before, was to disrupt, dismantle, and defeat al-Qaeda’s
ability to plan and execute terror operations. This part of the deliberative
process largely resembled the deliberative process from March, which included
a debate on what the center of gravity might be.

Many of the brainiacs in and around the five-sided puzzle palace considered
the Taliban to be the center of gravity. Stan McChrystal and Joint Chiefs Chairman
Adm. Mike Mullen considered the Afghan people to be the center of gravity, but
that’s largely because they buy the balderdash Gen. David Petraeus’ underlings
wrote in the new plagiarized
Counterinsurgency (COIN) Field Manual. Sen. John
Kerry, not exactly known for his ability to devise and execute winning strategies,
thinks the center of gravity in Afghanistan is Pakistan. Now the top dogs with
the brass plates in their skulls are saying the center of gravity is southern
Afghanistan.

Poppycock. None of these guys would recognize a center of gravity if it pitched
a tent in their heinies.

Carl von Clausewitz
described the center of gravity as "the point against which all our energies
should be directed.” That point must of necessity be the thing most closely
associated with our objective. So if our objective is to end al-Qaeda’s ability
to plan and execute terror operations, a slow child could correctly conclude
with little deliberation at all that the center of gravity is al-Qaeda. Funny
how Obama’s chess champs couldn’t reach such an obvious conclusion through their
advanced decision-making processes. Maybe the problem was too simple for them.
Or maybe it was too hard. Maybe they should take up checkers, or better yet
that childen’s card game where you play one card at a time. What’s it called
again? Oh yeah – War!

War is, in fact, exactly what Obama’s security team is playing. Long
War, to be specific, the Pentagon’s grand strategy to keep low-level conflicts
active for another half-century or longer to justify the military budget. That’s
why they don’t want to come out and call al-Qaeda the center of gravity. National
Security Adviser James
Jones admits there are at a maximum 100 al-Qaeda operatives in Afghanistan,
and probably fewer than 400 in Pakistan. Other
studies estimate that there may be fewer than 10 core al-Qaeda members left.
It’s pretty hard to justify a 50-year war for the sake of taking out fewer than
500 Islamo-hooligans (at most) who are on the run. The other problem with that
approach is that with modern mobile communications technology, al-Qaeda needs
a safe haven in Af-Pak to plan terror attacks on America even less than the
Japanese needed a sanctuary in Alaska to plan Pearl Harbor.

So we’re sticking with the same game plan as before, even though it’s even
more farcical now than it was then. The Afghan president, who is as crooked
as the Snake River, stole
two elections, his hand-picked election inspectors declared him "reelected,"
and the Obama administration tripped all over its collective sex organ declaring
Karzai the "legitimate" leader of Afghanistan so we can say we have
a reliable partner for our counterinsurgency effort that now includes timelines
that mean absolutely nothing. ("Depending on conditions on the ground."
Where have we heard that load of snot rag before?)

Pakistan’s military and intelligence service have made President Asif
Ali Zardari as much of an empty hat as George W. Bush was, and Pakistan
is becoming as corrupt as Afghanistan is.

As for international involvement, Obama has managed to bully NATO countries
into sending more troops to Afghanistan, but the second our bureaucratic twit
Secretary of Defense Bob
Gates complains for the umpteenth time that NATO doesn’t know how to fight
guerrillas, NATO’s going to tell Gates where he can stick his guerrillas and go
home.

Those weeks of "deliberative process" were little more than cover
for the fact that Obama was once again going to put on his kneepads and give
his generals everything they wanted. I shriek every time Obama gives a speech
in which he talks about how brilliant Petraeus is when the facts are that all
Petraeus knows how to do is hand out guns to bad guys, bribe the bad guys not
to use the guns he just gave them, and then act surprised when they use the
guns anyway.

Here’s what Obama needs to change right now. He needs to drop the vagina monologues,
get his generals under control or fire them, start acting like the commander
in chief, and quit acting like Bizarro FDR.

Author: Jeff Huber

Commander Jeff Huber, U.S.
Navy (retired), was a naval flight officer who commanded an aircraft
squadron and was operations officer of the USS Theodore Roosevelt,
the carrier that fought the Kosovo War. Jeff earned a master of arts degree in post-modern imperialism at the U.S. Naval War College. His weekly satires on U.S. foreign policy high jinks are archived at
his blog, Pen
and Sword.
Jeff’s critically applauded novel Bathtub
Admirals, a
lampoon of America’s rise to global dominance, is on sale now.
Jeff lives with dogs in a house by the beach on Chesapeake Bay in Virginia,
and in the summer he has a nice tan.